Building on the success of the previous two years, we agreed to be one of the "Grail of Greatness Premium Sponsors" for the third instalment of Rome FileMaker Week, a week-long event in the ancient Rome that again went far beyond being just another developers conference. Styled around the Indiana Jones theme, the event brought adventure, fun, Italian food and coffee, along with a lot of FileMaker and Claris focused technical content of high quality delivered by speakers from all aound the world.
24U Software all in
The whole 24U Software team (the software division of 24U) got invited and the whole team ended up going, except for one colleague who got unfortunately sick just a day before leaving, and one who brought his new born baby girl home just 2 days ahead of us leaving. Our missing colleages were, however, able to participate as well thanks to the whole conference being streamed live, they just could not join us for the local Italian adventures.
Pre-conference advantures
We all started with two days of exploration adventures in the archelogist-style, uncovering some interesting parts of the Roman Empire's past, yet with the help of modern technology. Of course, we did not forget to enjoy the Italian espresso. Most of us were unable to forget we're FileMaker developers and problem solvers, so I have no doubt you'll see some of the photos taken there or some of the Roman history inspiring some elements of future FileMaker solutions.
Pre-conference learning
On Wednesday, participating Claris partners met to discuss present and future of the Claris platform from various perspectives, after which two in-person and one online workshop took place simultaneously. In our FileMaker Performance & Bug Busting Pro Adventure we shared part of our testing, bug fixing, benchmarking and performance optimization experience. Our team effort resulted in a great learning experience with 1:1 support for the on-site attendees. Even the most experienced developer (with 32 years of experience) participating (and the most successful solver of our challenges) found the workshop valuable, which, to me, is the biggest compliment.
The Dial of FileMaker Destiny
After the main conference kicked off I had a chance to introduce our Initiative '24 and present when a millisecond matters in terms of the whole solution performance. I then convinced the conference attendees who had not voted yet to vote live for my idea to make the FileMaker calculation engine significantly faster. Great speakers Giulio Villani, Chris Moyer and Koji Takeuchi followed with their insightful technical sessions, Douglas Wallis revealed some of the Claris Platform future, then Andrea Francica, Albina Cuni and Franco Farnedi shared their experience from business process and user experience designs.
The Chopito quest
In the end of Thursday my colleague Martin took the lead and moderated an adventurous treasure hunt using an online game named Chopito. Martin developed the game in Claris FileMaker and it was available to both on-site and online attendees of the conference to play. Each of the participants who signed in had to answer 54 visual questions from three areas - Rome, Adventure History and IT Treasures. You would hardly find any other occasion with so many FileMaker developers simultaneously focused on their screens trying to win the race. After the quest we got some pizza to eat and Charles Delfs demoted his FMBetterForms.
Supercharged Friday
The second conference day was no less technical, starting fast with Jeroen Aarts talking about solution with over 1000 concurrent users, Emanuela Spagnoli and Natalia Pau sharing their inspiring developer journeys, Russel Watson (known as Mr. Watson) convincing us to use more developer tools and be more efficient, Christian Schmitz revealing what's new in his MBS plug-in, Alexis Allen guiding us to find the right balance between aesthetics and functionality, John Renfrew explaining why OData 4.01 is the future of FileMaker integrations, Caroline Crémieux-Charpentier diving deep into Claris Studio and Mihaela Cornaton revealing the huge opportunity of the Middle-East market. Giulio Villani and I wrapped the day up by discussing what features or improvements we developers would consider the most valuable to come in the future version of FileMaker.
The best in the end
I think it was either Evelyn Strappaveccia or Mariangela Salafia who told me they intentionally scheduled the best sessions to the last day, but I think it was just to make me feel good as mine was one of them. The technical level of those Saturday's sessions was nevertheless definitely not a bit lower than those from the previous two days with Joan Subirós explaining how to send HTML e-mails from FileMaker, Joe Scarpetta mastering the art of scoping, Nicola Franco evaluating the pros and cons of Claris Connect, Giulio Villani demoing the new Inspector Pro 8, Dimitris Kokoutsidis scaring everyone up with security issues we had better be aware of.
I then shared our results of testing performance of FileMaker 2024 and the story how we optimized performance of our own web based client portal, shortening one of the slowest operations from over 20 seconds to less than 100 milliseconds, followed by Joe Scarpetta revealing some challenges around SBA and vertical solutions, Ian Jempson diving deep into semantic search, and finally Johan Hedman sharing hints on how to leverage the full potential of FileMaker through proxy load balancing.
The show is going on
Unlike the previous years, this year's Rome FileMaker Week has brought not only one day of workshops and three days of highly technical sessions you could attend on-site or online, but also one extra track of pre-recorded sessions every attendee can watch at own convenience. So the event has not officially ended and you can enjoy even more technical contents from Patrick Daneau, Caroline Crémieux-Charpentier, Javier Durá, Cris Ippolite, Federico Severin, Matt Navarre, David Knight, Jeremy Brown, Fabio Bosisio, and Vince Menanno.
And for those who have not been able to attend this great event in Rome, we hope to see you at the even bigger European conference, EngageU. And in the meantime, you can't do any wrong by learning why and then voting for a faster calculation engine, if you have not done so yet...
